Commercial and industrial laundering facilities for processing clothing such as employee uniforms have become increasingly sophisticated in order to meet customer demand efficiently and economically. Laundering is only one aspect of the service provided by commercial and industrial laundries. After laundering, a garment such as a shirt must be dried, visually and manually inspected and hangered. The hangered shirts are then transferred to a machine for removing the wrinkles and from there to devices for sorting the shirts so that they are delivered to the proper customer.
The speed at which garments such as shirts can be processed in commercial laundering facilities is dependent in part upon the time required to inspect the shirts for defects and then to hanger them in preparation for further processing. In the past, both the inspection and hangering operations have been done manually. Inspection of a shirt requires the worker to visually observe the back, front, sides and neck area of the shirt, and then to manually handle the shirt to feel any defects which might be missed by the visual inspection. After such inspection, it is customary to manually place the shirt on a hanger and then hook the hangered shirt on a rack or bar for transport to the next processing station.
A problem with the prior art method of inspecting shirts described above is that the worker has to perform the visual and touch inspection operations separately, and this increases the time required to completely inspect a shirt. To visually inspect a shirt, workers have had to grasp the shirt by hand and turn it from front to back so that the buttons, buttonholes, shirt pocket, collar and other areas of the shirts can be fully viewed. After this visual inspection, the worker then performs a touch inspection before placing the shirt on a hanger. This two-stage inspection procedure for inspecting shirts, and the manual placement of the inspected shirts on hangers, are time-consuming operations but are necessary to find defects and to process the shirts through the laundering facility.
Another problem with prior art methods of inspecting shirts is that the visual inspection is usually limited to an examination of the exterior surfaces of the garment. In most cases, no attempt is made to inspect the interior surfaces of the front, back, sides or arms of the shirt where defects could be present but go unnoticed from an inspection of the exterior surfaces of the shirt.